An assignment

On

Personal Leadership & Management Development

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 Executive summary

Through this assignment, a conceptual analysis has been made on the Personal Leadership &
Management Development plan based on the organization where it deals with the learning
and development plan of the leadership and management process. Here, different learning
approaches are shown along with effective implication of these tools and techniques, which
can play a vital role in the proper management of the firm and leads to the success of the
organization. Here it is analysed very clearly how an effective personal leadership and
management plan can energized an employee and leads them to be a leader to the successful
completion of the goals. Researcher has given emphasis on effectiveness of Personal
Leadership and Development Plan (PLDP). This lesson also talks about the periodic review
and update of the development plan to cope up with the changing world. Moreover, it is clear
that all these theoretical knowledge will help anyone in his/her future practical working life.

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 Contents
Executive summary...............................................................................................................................ii
1 Introduction...................................................................................................................................2
2 Leadership and Management Skills to Achieve Organizational Objectives....................................2
2.1 The Impact of Organizational Objectives, values and Culture................................................2
2.2 The leadership and Management Skills.................................................................................3
2.3 Assessment of Personal Leadership and Management Skills.................................................3
3 Managing Development of Personal Leadership and Management Skills.....................................4
3.1 Opportunities for the Development of leadership Skills........................................................4
3.2 Personal Leadership Development Plan (PLDP).....................................................................4
3.3 Managing personal development Plan..................................................................................6
4 Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Leadership Development Plans................................................7
4.1 Review Personal Development Plan against Original Objectives...........................................7
4.2 Evaluating the Effectiveness of Personal Development Plan.................................................7
4.3 Analyze and Update the Area for Further Development.......................................................8
5 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................8

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1 Introduction
The main discussion in this area is related to how to develop the personal leadership quality required
for successful achievement of leadership process to lead the leader at the top of his/her ambition
development. To achieve all these, it has to set up different objectives, create values and
maintain a specific form of culture. These culture and value is unique from organization to
organization, which bind the whole organization in a specific circle. All these affect the
leadership and managerial activities of the organization.

2 Leadership and Management Skills to Achieve Organizational Objectives

2.1 The Impact of Organizational Objectives, values and Culture

Every organization has a mission, vision and goals. Generally, managers/leaders work not
only for profit making of the organization but also they have to ensure specific objective
fulfilment, value creation and maintenance of organizational culture. In these cases, based on
the culture, values and objectives the roles of leaders/mangers vary.

 Impact of Objectives: Based on the objectives, leadership process follows three

forms such as autocratic, bureaucratic and democratic. If the objectives of the
organization are unclear to the employees or if clear but employees is not willing to
do these work, then the leaders being autocratic, follow the rules “Do What I Say”. In
addition, to fulfil the objectives, leaders has to be bureaucratic and emphasis more on
to achievement of the goals than to the employee motivation. Contrary of above twos,
when the objectives motivate the employees and very much clear to them and
inspiring to them, leaders can follows democratic process and give the employees the
opportunities to participate in the decision-making.

 Impact on Values: Every organization follows specific forms of values and norms
and a leader has to follows all these value to lead the organization at a standard
position. That is why the managerial tools have to be set accordingly.

 Impact on Culture: Organizational culture is the beliefs and values that the
organization inhibits for long time. In addition, the leaders have to set up their
managerial activities knowing and following all these culture. For example, a business
organization who is concerned for public welfare along with profit making does not
permit to include fake products with good one.

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2.2 The leadership and Management Skills
The mangers and leaders have to work in the field practically and have to direct their fellow
employees. To ensure proper direction and guidelines, an effective manager should have
different types of skills, i.e.

 Conceptual skills: Enhance mental ability to diagnose problem and find out quick
solution by analysing different alternatives.
 Communication Skills: Increase capacity to generate idea and turn it into work
performance, good presentation skills and managing sub-ordinates.
 Effectiveness skills: multi-tasking, ability to perform work effectively.
 Interpersonal Skill: Ensure training, monitoring, networking, group working.

2.3 Assessment of Personal Leadership and Management Skills

Leaders have different styles and one’s styles might not be aligning with that of others. For
this reason, the policy and situational factors an effective leader adopts to handle a problem
will be more or less different from other leaders. The cause is that the mentality to solve any
problem is not the same. The communication skills also vary. In addition, the interpersonal
skills like to cope up with the group mates.
However, conflicts arise within the interest of the employees for the lack of leaders /
managers’ lacking of skills. Therefore, they are given training to develop their personal skills
just because to align objectives, values and culture of the organization. Managers have to
work in a complex environment, process information quickly, take decisions evaluating
different alternatives. All skills the managers possess should have been developed and
retained to cope up with the changing environment and globalized world.

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3 Managing Development of Personal Leadership and Management Skills

3.1 Opportunities for the Development of leadership Skills

The managers in the organization are skilled in different ways. The organization offers them
different opportunities like Coaching and Training.

 Coaching: Executive management coaching mainly focuses on the individual

mangers needs above the general skills. The handling of confidential resources rests
on them. In addition, they have to develop strategies to upgrade the underperforming
employees. To ensure all these qualities, managers’ performance is assessed against
different leadership competencies, getting projects off the ground etc.

 Training: Another approaches to develop leadership skills is training that is based on

the latest learning theories. Generally, it is customized that what skills suit with the
vision, guiding principles and values, strategies and the objectives tools of the
organization. Then different leadership competencies are identified. After that, leaders
are trained accordingly. In these case different types of training tools are adopted like
Strategic thinking, managing the performance of others, relationship management,
critical thinking to implementation, quality service management, coaching others and
so many ways.

Besides these two, leaders follow self-assessment to develop their skills. They develop the
power of thinking and power of listening. Emotional Intelligence is also one of the best ways.

3.2 Personal Leadership Development Plan (PLDP)

Personal Leadership Development Plan is a way of individual learning for whom who is
going to be emerged as a leader. It can be used as a reference point for personal growth. So
remind, your plan should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. In creating
this plan, one has to explore his/her:

1. Current Skill: First, the trainee has to determine what types of skills one has and how
much efficient with his/her skills? In a word, what does he know about himself? One can
take feedback from others about his/her current skills.

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2. Personal Development Goal: with the foundation of current skills, one has to set up
his/her expected goals. That is what he/she wants to develop, why all these are important
for personal development, how he/she will achieve them and perform in the work field.
To set up expected goal one can set some benchmarks like-
 Increase confidence in your ability and capacity
 Highly committed to achievement
 Hold your power, authority and knowledge
 A strong network of communication
 Always think positive.

With these criteria, rate your position and measure progress towards achieving your goals.

3. The views of service users: talk to people who are using your service. The trainees try to
understand what they are thinking. How good his/her service is? How much better they
expect about your leadership process.

4. Know your organization: try to understand the mission, vision and strategies of the
organization. You have also to know the board of directors and your team members. All
these will help you to design your expectation goals.

5. Meet with your sponsor: conduct main issue discussed in the meeting with your sponsor,
recall your action in the meetings and the reflection of others against your actions.

6. Visits: keep records of your visits. Where did u go? Why did you go? What you did and
what have u learnt.

7. Effective contact directory: notes phone, telephone, email and all about their contact
directory.

3.3 Managing personal development Plan

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When going to implement personal development plan for the development of leadership
skills, one should use the framework of capacity to measure and improve his/her knowledge
skills and behaviour to reach at the expected level of development point. When the
development plan is going to reflect management and leadership skills, one should consider
different capacities in,

 Manage development as a manager and your personal skills development like

communicating and presentation skill, planning work etc.
 Provide direction to develop and implement plans, promoting and managing diversity
and ensuring compliance with legal, regulatory, ethical and social requirements.
 Facilitate change, encouraging innovation and continuous improvement.
 Develop working relationship with colleagues and proper allocating, motivating,
monitoring and feeding back work procedures.
 Ensure proper management of resources, managing finance and promoting
technology.
 Ensure effective customer service, understanding the market and improving
performance.

Figure: Managing Capacities in Personal Development Plan

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4 Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Leadership Development Plans

4.1 Review Personal Development Plan against Original Objectives

Employees in the organization are trained up under the personal development plan to show their
expected performance in the work field. However, it is a matter of concern that how much the
program becomes effective. Therefore, after certain times when the employees come in force and
show their performance, their qualities is reviewed based on original objectives and try to understand
if there is any deviation that doesn’t align with the original objectives. After that the company works
for further implications of knowledge and work qualities. Actually, proper coordination of plan and
reviewing ensure the best learning of the employees.

4.2 Evaluating the Effectiveness of Personal Development Plan

After applying and managing personal development plan in the organization, the authority
evaluates the effectiveness of the plan. Generally, the HR wants to gain the information by
analysing the answers of different questions about the effectiveness of leadership
development plan like, how well the plan work. What are the most interactive approaches to
make the learning more efficient? Which training method can ensure the employees’ needs
etc. Here, five ways have been analysed to evaluate the plan by assessing the personal
leadership plan-

1) Participant’s reaction: All the trainees participated in the development plan should
have been surveyed about what they have learnt. To conduct the survey a short
questionnaire has been prepared and let all the trainees participate in the surveying to
share their reaction after training.
2) Learning evaluation: Administer the survey by analyzing the questionnaire. In this
case, it is analyzed what skills the trainee has at the pre-training level and what they
have learnt. What was the expected outcome desired from the employees and what
are the expectation gap.
3) Application and implementation evaluation: After the training program employees
returns in their work place and apply their overall learning from program in the real
life. Keeping a benchmark as the standard, implementation of the leadership
development plan has been evaluated.
4) Impact in business: The ultimate goal of this program is to ensure higher work
satisfaction, lower absenteeism, higher employee engagement and in the end higher
performance. Ensure effectiveness and efficiency in these issues. Again, financial
data like sales growth, profit margin etc can be taken in consideration.

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 5) Return on investment: At the end, now evaluate the effectiveness of this development
plan against real value enhancement in the organization. That’s why calculate
organization’s return on investment to measure the trainee’s actual gain in monetary
terms.

All above these, when assessing the effectiveness of the leadership development program
various external factor should have been taken into consideration. In this case, we can use
trend line analysis, compare the group performance with others, consider the threats of new
competitors and technology innovation.

4.3 Analyze and Update the Area for Further Development

As we, all know in this era of globalization change and innovation continues over the time,
which has no ending point. To be a successful leader of the organization, everyone has to
consider it and develop the leadership process up to match with the changing environment.
For example, due to cope up with the changing world, the company handling its work
manually has to change its work process and the manager would have to take initiative steps
to update their work procedure to automated and computerized system.

5 Conclusion
Strategic management plays a very vital role in success of the business organization over the life cycle
of the company. Firstly, he/she has to ambitious, energetic and convey about his/her strength and
weakness. The section describes what initiative the company should take to overcome such weakness
of the manager. No formal learning make an employee perfect learner. A manager learns from every
steps of his work life. In addition, all of his/her learning affects the value of the firm, the net profit of
the firm, and the returns on the investment of the firm. Therefore, proper coordination of leadership
development plan and effective implication of the knowledge in the workforce leads to the successful
achievement of organization’s mission, vision, objectives and goals.

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References
Blog.getabstract.com, (2013). Five Levels of Measurement for Evaluating a Leadership
Development Program.

Brookes.ac.uk, (n.d.). Personal development - Directorate of Human Resources - Oxford

Brookes University.

Businessballs.com, (n.d.). leadership training, leadership tips, theory, skills, for leadership
training and development.

Lcbglobal.co.uk, (n.d.). Professional Development For Strategic Managers. London College

of Business.

Tippie.uiowa.edu, (n.d.). Personal Development Plan - Leadership - Full-Time MBA.

Ukessays.com, (2014). Personal development as a strategic manager.

REFLECTION ON PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN PROGRESS AND POTENTIAL.

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